Teleport and Compare Suite for competitors' site monitoring

My name is Keith Gengler and I was looking for solution to monitor any kind of web-site for some information.  I was looking for an easy to use, inexpensive and effective solution. So my conclusion is that the best solution for that kind of purposes is some off-line browser + some comparison tool + some search tool if you need it. In this article I describe "Teleport + Compare Suite" solution, which is beneficial for me.

What tools do I need?

Just two tools - Teleport and Compare Suite.

Teleport is an off-line browser, an all-purpose high-speed tool for getting data from the Internet. It is useful for anyone including executives, financiers, sales and home users. Use Teleport if you need to download some information to browser it lately in airport or if you want to do some changes analysis. The best recommendation for Teleport is PC Magazine's Editors' Choice for offline browsers.

You can find Teleport on http://tenmax.com/  

There are some other Teleport's features that might be useful for you. With Teleport you can:

• Search a website for files of a certain type and size
• Search a website for keywords
• Download all or part of a website to your computer, enabling you to browse the site directly from your hard disk at much greater speeds than if you were to browse the site online

Compare Suite is a tool for file comparison. It was designed for office usage, I mean it is beneficial for those who deals with a paperless office and deals with all popular file formats - Word (.doc), Acrobat (.pdf), Excel (.xls) documents and Web-Pages (.htm). You can find Compare Suite on http://www.comparesuite.com 

Pricing information

As Teleport costs 39.95$ and Compare Suite personal costs 60$ you'll have to spend 100$. And it's a good deal, because for 100$ you'll get: an off-line browser, comparison tool, and web-sites monitoring solution.

Configuring Teleport

It's easy to configure Teleport in a right way:

1) Run Teleport and select New Project Wizard command in File menu.

2) When Teleport asks "What do you want Teleport to do" set the "Duplicate a web site, including directory structure" answer. Click "Next" button to continue.

3) Put the name of web-site, for example www.amazon.com, put 3 to deep level value .

4) "When duplicating the website, copy these files". Use "Just text" for fastest download. Note: you don't need to download graphics to do comparative analysis. Click "Next" button.

5) Click "Finish" button and save project file to your hard disk.

6) Now it's time to setup scheduler. Select "Schedule..." command in Project menu. 

7) Click "+" button to add the new project to scheduler. Put scheduling properties you need.

8) Then select Activate command in File menu to activate Teleport's scheduler.

Note: after downloading web-site to some project, for example to ..\my project\files, you should rename it to ..\my project\files_mm_dd_yyyy

Using Compare Suite

You should have two folders, for example ..\my project\011704 and ..\my project\011705, which contain old and new web-sites downloaded by Teleport.

1) Now run Compare Suite. Select "New folder comparison" in File menu.

2) Click "..." button to specify folder's path on the left (..\my project\files_12_20_2003) and on the right panel (..\my project\files_01_20_2004)

3) Compare Suite will compare two folders

4) Then you can: generate comparative report by selecting Report option in File menu or use Compare Suite and compare changed files on by one.

Useful note: Compare Suite can compare web-pages in a two ways - as a htm coded text or as a easy readable text from web-page. You need the second one. Make sure .htm converter is enabled. Go to Tools -> Options. Select there Plugins-HtmL, the check box must be checked.

Any questions

Well, if you have any questions about Teleport then I'd recommend you to visit it's home page and use forum or contact e-mail. The same thing about Compare Suite, these guys will be happy to help.

If you have some suggestion for me personally, then please use this e-mail to contact me:

NOSPAMkeith_gengler_2004@yahoo.com but remove NOSPAM, so my e-mail must looks like keith_gengler_20.... 

Thank you!

Keith Gengler

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